Hobbies

I am having fun.

In the last year, I think I’ve rediscovered just about every hobby I left behind in 4th grade. My favorite things to do as a kid: read and write stories, sew and take pictures. I don’t know when I stopped doing most of these things, but it was probably sometime around middle school or high school. (Enter: homework, internet, driver’s license, etc.) Throughout college and grad school, most of my free time was taken up with schoolwork and part-time jobs, and of course, hanging out with friends. Just a few months after I finished grad school, I started coaching training and diverted my free time to getting my business off the ground. I think I have forgotten what it was like to do things just for fun.

It’s a bit like being 12 again, to get lost behind a camera lens, in the whirring of a sewing needle, or watching my thoughts become strung together in a cohesive story as I type.

After our crafts night and spending an obscene amount of time perusing sewing blogs, I felt inspired to revisit my sewing machine. I’ve had that machine since middle school, but in the last 8 years, I think the only thing I’ve actually sewn is a set of curtains that Buddy tore down.

I didn’t really know exactly what I was going to do, but I had some inspiration from Lex’s blog. Matt and I had these bright blue matching t-shirts, the kind you buy at a crafts store, from playing on an softball team last year. I knew we weren’t going to wear them again, so I just started cutting his up and making ruffles out of the scraps. Eventually, I got brave enough to cut the neckline on my t-shirt into a v-neck and re-hem it, and then started laying the ruffles out on it and sewing them down. I was shocked to see it come together – I confess, I love it. Beginner’s luck?

Anyways, here’s the end result. By the way, it’s really hard to take a self-portrait without feeling like a giant goober, so forgive me.

I can’t wait to go home and tear apart something else in my goodwill pile.

Equinox

Today is, officially, the first day of spring. Thankfully, Mother Nature happily obliged. The sun is shining, the grass is green, the sky is blue and the construction hammers in my neighborhood are going double-time. I feel like doing something crazy to welcome spring. Maybe I’ll pack up my turtlenecks!

Yesterday I was walking through Wake Forest’s quad to take something to the post office. It’s a weird thing, to walk around my old campus. I still expectantly look around, as if at any minute I might see a familiar face – a roommate, a sorority sister, a classmate. The people are strangers to me now (and look absurdly young, I might mention) but the scene was exactly the same as any First Sunny Friday I could recall: people spilling out of the balconies in Poteat, Frisbees being tossed on the quad, girls in big sunglasses, jean skirts and sorority jerseys laying on blankets with the false premise of trying to do some reading. For a moment it made me nostalgic – I longed to go back to a place and time when most all of my favorite people lived within a 1-mile radius and our worries centered around crafting the perfect Away Message, but as I headed on to my lovely home, my eager puppy dog and my handsome hubby my sense of contentment with this time and place returned, and all that remained was a grateful feeling for the experiences and where they have taken me.

We had some friends over last night for the first official cookout of the warm weather season. I love so many things about this time of year, but one of my favorites is group cookouts. We had our friends Anne + Locke and Kate + Charlie over, after Matt and Locke finished up an afternoon on the nearby links. It felt so luxurious to be able to sit outside on the deck with just a light cardigan on, enjoying good food, wine and company. I will refrain from discussing the ensuing Catchphrase games, but suffice it to say, the girls will redeem themselves next time.

Speaking of gratitude, I didn’t get my Thankful Thursday posts up two weeks in a row… and it’s not because I’m not thankful! I called my sister, the English teacher, to ask her if she could come up with any synonyms for thankful that started with S so I could do a spin-off for Saturday. Nothing we came up with seemed to have the right ring to it.

Here’s what we had come up with: Satisfied Saturday. Serene Saturday. Sincere Saturday. Sagacious Saturday. Surreptitious Saturday. (Which does not mean thankful by any stretch of the imagination, but I liked the way it rolled off my tongue and I tried to convince her that Saturday was usurping Thursday's role, and therefore the name fit.) Serendipitous Saturday. Seriously So Blessed Saturday. (I really lobbied hard for that one, but since Katie didn’t get the reference, I figured most others wouldn’t either.)

We couldn’t come up with anything. Anyone have a good suggestion? (Suggestive Saturday? Hmmm.)

Regardless, I am thankful, it is Saturday and here is a list. Enjoy.

• The sun, the warm weather, the just-in-time arrival of Spring.
• The arrival into this world of sweet Madelyn Jane, and the health of her momma Katie
• Finalized plans for Winocation – my trip to Wine Country with my college girlfriends. Less than 2 weeks til departure!
• Waking up to no alarm today
• My hard-working hubby, who not only had to wake up to an alarm, but had to go to work after said alarm went off. Boo.
• My Aunt Jennifer, who is celebrating a birthday today. She deserves to have a day as beautiful and lovely as she is.
• The opportunity to do a public speaking gig this week to a phenomenal group of people
• Heather and her HTML capabilities and her excitement and willingness to try and figure out my blog-puzzle
• Running. I have missed it, and it feels good to be back doing something I love.
• And on that note, health. 3 months now. Countdown restarted, and I intend to break my 3 year record this time.
• OH and on that note, my doctor. He called me to follow up on a question I had left his nurse, and took a good ten minutes to talk to me about some questions I had, and even sent me some abstracts that have yet to be published. Anyone who thinks the health care system is broken should remember that a system can be broken, but the people within the system can do a pretty good job at holding the pieces together. (I include my hubby in this – I think going to work in an emergency room every day is the epitome of seeing the broken system, but he just puts his head down and works hard to do what he’s there to do.)
• And on the note of the research abstracts… Jess! I am so thankful for her great experiences in her career, her recently published journal article that I totally did not understand the topic of but I am proud of anyways, passing her comp exams AND her plans for post-doc stuff. Watch out world, this girl is going to be doing big stuff in cancer research. Go Nurse Jessie K!
• My Aunt B’s new blog which is about 75% food/organics/health and 25% musings and observations, and makes me adore her even more than I already do. Go ahead and read it: http://www.swymathecove.com/
• Randomly catching “Only Want to Be With You” (by Hootie) on the radio on my way home from work yesterday. That song instantly transports me back to dating Matt, to one of my favorite dates – a Hootie/BTE concert in Raleigh, and to our wedding day. It’s the song that always reminds me of what an awesome and wonderful thing it is to love and be loved.
• Target’s wine selection. Surprised to find it is pretty darn good.
• A coaching session I had on Friday – it never fails that anytime I coach this one woman (which is about once a month), I learn from her more than I think she learns from me. Or at the very least, it’s mutual. I swear the things that come out of my mouth when I’m coaching her are exactly the things I need to be remembering or paying attention to myself. God’s timing is perfect, ya’ll.
• Blueberry crumb bars from Smitten Kitchen. Butter, sugar, berries. Yum. (Thanks, Heath!)
• My mom and her always available, never bored of me, listening ears.
• My Buddy boy. He had a good week. Won’t say more or I’ll jinx it.
• That I could probably keep on typing this list the rest of the afternoon, but a homemade frappe and some book editing on the book porch await me instead.

And I will leave you with this, my usual gratuitous doggy pic, and the hopes that Spring has found you where ever you may be reading this from.

Pitiful is the new cute.

Crafty

Last night I had a bunch of my girl friends over for a craft night. I credit my long-held love of crafting to my mom, who kept me and my sister happily entertained with a glue gun, some fabric scraps and a whole bag of sequins and buttons. I remember walking around Jo-Ann Fabric with my mom to pick out fabric for our Halloween costumes, and being enthralled with the rows and rows of different bolts of fabrics and the endless possibilities for their uses. My forays into crafts have been varied in their success and duration. There was even a brief phrase in high school where I was making my own clothes. I’ll ask my mom to kindly burn any photographic evidence of the famous blue fleece pants. (My sister, who back then was a cooler-than-thou Abercrombie wearing, best lunch table sitting 7th grader, still shudders at this memory.)

All that being said, my love for and intentions to complete most projects are often greater than my actual follow through and my success. Despite that, I’ve kept a folder of various magazine tear outs and have been bookmarking blogs for years of things I want to get my hands messy with, and just waited for “the right time” to do them.

You’re inspired aren’t you? Admit it. Fabric will do that to you.

I’ve often thought knitting on a metro commute, or losing track of the hours with nothing more than a glue stick and a foam board made me a little bit, well, frumpy. Uncool. Older than my years. A good friend of mine in college was keen on saying I was “a 30-year-old trapped in a 22-year-old body” and he was right. (Umm, back then, 30 sounded really old.) So it was with a little bit of hesitation that I sent an email to a handful of girl friends inviting them over for a night of glue guns, fabric and learning our way around pinking shears.

I made sure to mention there would be wine.

I was delighted to find that my crafty streak was shared by many of my friends, although it shouldn’t totally surprise me. Many of the girls I have become close to here in Winston, in my “married person life”, share my love of creating things and nurturing our nests – cooking, blogging, photography, getting disproportionately excited about Pottery Barn sale items… you get the idea. Seems we are still in the 30somethings at heart, but now our bodies are catching up.

Our craft night was so much fun, and other ideas were tossed around for future projects and activities. I find, with as many bookmarked ideas as I have accumulated over the last ten years or so, that I rarely take the time for myself to do these kinds of things that are fun and relaxing to me, but completely “unproductive.” When it comes down to it, a typical Thursday night with Matt at work I probably would have spent catching up on the laundry or filing the bills or making a grocery list. To carve out the time and invite other people held me accountable to the completion of a project, not just the intention, and was a great way to spend time with some of my favorite people.

Oh, in case you’re wondering, we made fabric covered Easter eggs. I got the idea from it from this blog. It was super simple and I wanted to start off with a project that didn’t involve any sewing or anything intimidating. It took an egg or two before we each got our wrapping methods down, and there were some glue-gun burnt fingers along the way (hope you are recovering, Anne!) but all in all, it was a great success.

More crafts to come? I hope so.

Back Where I Come From

Growing up, my mom always made corned beef & cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day. I guess I’ve never asked, but I’m assuming she started doing it for my Dad, whose father is Irish. (Although, from what I’ve heard about my Grandma Swales, my mom’s mom, boiling everything in one big pot would have been right up her alley when it comes to cooking!)

This was my first time attempting to cook it myself, and I was pretty pleased with the results. (I actually made this on Sunday, but it seems appropriate to post it today.) Then again, you basically just continually add things to boiling water: meat first, then potatoes, then cabbage. Making the sauce involves stirring and microwaving. It’s pretty much a no-fail, and it goes a long way. Definitely can see why my Grandma Claffey (my Dad’s mom) would have been a fan of this, since she was tasked with the challenge of cooking for nine every night!

I could hear her voice while I was cooking, with one of her most famous quotes:

“If potatoes weren’t so common, they would be a delicacy!”

I guess this should go on my cooking blog, but then again, it’s not the healthiest meal I’ve ever made, so between you and me, let's just agree to leave it here.

Did I mention soda bread? Mmmm, soda bread. We’ve been eating this for almost a week now.

I love being Irish. Growing up in the North I experienced a big focus on “where your family comes from.” Maybe it’s because the northern states were “melting pots” much more than the South, but I’ve not come across this same fascination with the place of origin in the South. Here, when you ask someone where they are from, they are likely to tell you which county their relatives have lived in for the last 100 years! That kind of longevity of place is a bit of a novel concept for most Northerners.

In 3rd grade, we had to make cut out paper dolls to represent our family's country of origin. I specifically remember using an excessive amount of red yarn for hair, and plenty of freckles. In 4th grade, we had to interview an older relative about their relatives - during this project I learned my great aunt was supposed to come over to America on the Titanic but fortuitously fell ill and couldn't make the departure! In 5th grade, we had Immigration Day in elementary school. We had to dress up from whatever country our ancestors had come from, and if I recall right, there was a pretend Ellis Island type experience and a swearing-in assembly. Oh, us melting pot of Western European suburban kids!

I was very conflicted as to whether to represent my Swedish ancestors (Mom’s side) or my Irish ancestors (Dad’s side.) In the end, I choose Swedish for one simple reason: I was blonde.

Other than our somewhat odd fascination with immigration projects from 3rd grade to 5th grade, I haven’t dabbled much in my family’s roots. My brother spent sometime in college tracing my Dad’s line back to Ireland, and my mother’s father has a great record of his family dating back to England. The first time I learned that my Grandma Swales (Mom’s side) had descended from Swedish missionaries who had lived in Venezuela was at her funeral!

As I grow older, I find myself being tugged back towards my roots. I know very little about my family beyond my grandparents – which is the complete opposite of my “100 years in one county” husband who can tell tales of a great-great uncle who was a physician who traveled on horseback throughout Lincoln County and a great-great grandfather who was a pilot. It wasn’t until about a year ago, when putting together a family tree in my wedding scrapbook, that I learned that my sister’s name – Kathryn – was my great-grandmother’s name.

I know that, strangely enough, this is some of my reason for blogging. Ever since learning my great-grandmother’s name, I’ve wondered who she was. At 27, what was she doing? What did she think? My mom has recently found and shared some writing from my Grandma (her Mom) and there’s something that seems magical about hearing the voice of the people who came before you. Especially, in the case of my Grandma, hearing her voice as a wife and a mother, before she played the only role I knew her as – grandmother. I blog for myself, to shake the voices and stories out of my head, to supplement my not-so-trusty memory, but also to put my voice out there for my someday children or their children to read and know who I was, before I play the only roles they will know me in. Isn’t that the fascinating thing about people? We play so many roles in our lives, yet we generally only know each other in one or two of them.

Maybe it’s the process of beginning to start a new branch of a family tree – getting married, the joining together of two families – that makes the desire to know more about where you come from grow stronger. Maybe it’s totally random. What do you think? Do you know much about your family line? Have you ever been curious to know more? Where would you start, if you wanted to know?

Who knew a blog on boiled cabbage was going to end up being a soliloquy on immortalizing my own voice? I think I forgot to mention another reason I blog: it turns out I can, and will, talk about anything I want.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, from a 25% 5th-Generation Proud to Be Irish Woman. Although, you should know, that’s just one of my roles.

Spring Has… Hinted At Its Probable Existence

My original title was “Spring Has Sprung”... but I'm not entirely sure that is true yet. There’s such a general consensus of relief, gratitude and giddiness pervading everyone today as we’re all enjoying wearing sunglasses and short sleeves for the last four days. It’s practically palpable. I hear rumors it’s not going to stay, but I’m putting my fingers in my ear and shouting LA LA LA LA at anyone who tries to tell me such lies. I’ve lived in North Carolina for eight years and this is by far the longest, coldest, grayest winter I can remember. It’s like Rochester or something….

“You’re from New York! You should be used to this!”

There’s a reason I used to go tanning in high school (I know, I know) and it wasn’t just because all-white cheerleading uniforms require a golden glow to look half-way decent. There’s a reason why I wear 3 pairs of pants to walk the dog, like to sit directly in front of the fireplace and own a Snuggie. There’s a reason I applied to college in the South all those years ago, and why I’ve joined everyone else on the complain train this last snowy spell. I love being warm.

So, the sun has shown herself for the last four days and it is glorious. This afternoon, my coworker/friend Lauren and I went for our training-to-train run (yes, I took so much time off from running this winter, that I am now training to get myself ready to train… pitiful). The sun was shining, the air had a touch of humidity and we were actually sweating. It was awesome. It was Springtime. It makes me start thinking of planning cookouts, wearing flip flops and going for long, quiet runs. Spring is hopeful.

Please, please, please, stay, Sun. At least for the next 10 months or so?

Restored

Oh, weekend.  You could not have gotten here any sooner.  I usually don’t feel that way… my weeks often go by so fast, the Friday afternoon almost catches me off guard.  This was one of those weeks that somewhere around Tuesday I was like a lil kid sitting in my front window just waiting for Friday to show up.  Just one of those weeks.

The weekend ended up being just the perfect blend of social time, me time and house-restoring time.  (And when I say restoring, I do not mean Bob Villa style… I mean restoring order, calmness, sanity and the throw pillows that somehow always seem to end up bunched in one corner of the couch.)

Friday night we had a very casual dinner at La Carreta with Zac + Jamie, and Matt + Donna.  I don’t think I’ve been there since college… but it hadn’t changed a bit.  Same wait staff, same cheap pitchers of margaritas, same never ending chip basket.  After dinner, we went downtown and Donna + I accompanied Jamie on a walk around the art district to complete her night photography assignment.  The boys busied themselves with the drafts at 6th & Vine.  I had taken my camera card out to upload the day before, and for the 2nd time that week, had forgotten to put it back in.  So I’m waiting on you, J-boo, to live vicariously through the awesome night pics you took! 

Saturday was the first hint of our long overdue Spring, and I’m pretty sure all of Winston found a way to be outside.  Matt finally got to crack open the golf bag, and I took Buddy on a long run after getting the house put back to order.  It seems like no matter what we do, sometime around Wednesday or Thursday our house starts to look a little bit like a tornado passed through, dropping Vera Bradleys and junk mail and pocket-sized medical references in every corner.  Thank goodness for Saturdays, and the chance to put it all back together.  (Literally.  My house and my self.)

Saturday night we got together with a bunch of the other Emergency Medicine interns and their wives for a wine and cheese party.  The premise was simple: bring a wine and a cheese to share and sample, but the outcome was superb.  (I think there’s few comestibles I love more than wine and cheese, so I’m fairly easy to please.)  Our hostess, Kim, went out of her way to make some other tapas, including an asparagus-prosciutto combination that Matt and I were still talking about 24 hours later and a fiery Spanish tomato dip called Romesco.  Imagine my envy when Kim described a 2-week cooking experience in Spain she and her mother had attended.  Oh my sweet heavens.  Who wants to send me?  I regret that I didn’t get my camera out, because the food was simply gorgeous.  (It tasted amazing, too, which I suppose is equally as important to non-food bloggers.)  I still feel a little hesitant to whip my camera out and start photographing food in places other than my own kitchen. 

Sunday we headed down to visit with Matt’s family and celebrate the March birthdays, including my mother’s-in-law tomorrow.  Matt’s aunt was in charge of the cooking, which was as delicious, abundant and Southern as any family gathering could hope for.   I consider myself very fortunate to have married into a family that is as loving, welcoming and accepting as the one I was born into.  I know this isn’t always the case, and any time I listen to a girlfriend tell a “mother-in-law” story, I send a little thanks up to my lucky stars for giving me such a wonderful second family. 

Matt’s family lives about 90 minutes west of us, but it doesn’t take 10 minutes of being on the highway before I am sound asleep, every time.  There is something about good food, warm homes and cozy conversations that knocks me out every time. 

It doesn’t take much to put me back together after one of those weeks: a clean home, some yummy food, and time well spent with friends and family.  It’s my very ctrl + alt + delete button that gets me ready for another Monday. 

May Appear Closer Than They Are

March

Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you. - Isaiah 60:1

Sunrise, March 1st, 2010